Entertainment

Why 'The Tale' is the movie everyone is talking about

Jennifer Fox's The Tale didn't get the fanfare of a traditional movie premiere, and a quick look at the trailer explains why. The Tale is the true story of Fox herself coming to terms with her sexual assault as a 13-year-old. It's heartbreaking, disturbing, and often difficult to watch – all of which makes it essential.

Though it is in many ways the story of what happened, The Tale stands out because it is the story of Fox (portrayed by Laura Dern) realizing what happened, decades later. The director has been emphatic about the fact that this is her story, both to pre-empt critics of its discomfiting nature and to keep these conversations going.

“It was not that I suddenly remembered more, because I always remembered everything," Fox told The Guardian. "It was like a light went on on a part of the room that I had kept slightly dim.”

Fox didn't revisit the memories of her "first boyfriend" until her 40s, when her mother (played in the film by Ellen Burstyn) found an old short story written by Fox as a teen (Isabelle Nélisse).

In the film, Fox's fiancee (Common) finds and reads the story and letters from the older coach who abused her (Jason Ritter). He tells her she was abused, that this was rape. "It was the '70s and people didn't talk about it like that," she says defensively, and hearing the thinness of that statement in context is chilling.

"Nobody was talking about sexual abuse and nobody was looking for it," Fox said in the Guardian interview.

Watching Nélisse and Ritter's scenes elicits immediate dread from the viewer, tempered only by the vain hope that perhaps the film won't go there. But it does – there are explicit depictions of sex with a minor (filmed with an adult body double) – and Fox wouldn't budge on that, calling the scenes "nonnegotiable."

“For me, intuitively I felt, look, this film is about the fact that we cannot look away from what child sexual abuse looks like," Fox told The Cut. "I feel like, for me, we had to see the truth, and truth is horrific. It was not nice. It was not romantic. It was painful.”

Jason Ritter as the 40-something coach Bill and Elizabeth Debicki as Mrs. G, who lures young Jenny into child sexual abuse at Bill's hands.

Image: kyle kaplan/hbo

The Tale makes a strong statement with Nélisse's casting (she was 11 during filming) to illustrate just how young even teenagers are – but it also allows for her to show those beginnings of individual identity, the seeds that will grow over the formative years that follow and which are irrevocably influenced by this episode.

“I was making choices without the ability to understand or without the experience to know what was in front of me, but in my mind I was making choices," Fox told The Cut. "It wasn’t like I was a piece of putty."

Conversations about sexual power dynamics are currently at the forefront of cultural discourse.

Conversations about sexual power dynamics are currently at the forefront of cultural discourse. Consent is defined, debated, pored over. As much as young Jenny in the film tells herself she was okay with the abuse or calls it a relationship, Fox's film painstakingly crafts the nuance of her victimhood. Her predator is no cartoon villain, and he leads her to think she's making choices and decisions with subtle, daring emotional manipulation.

"One of the ways we survive – and say, 'Oh, my god, I'm so lucky, I don't know how this person survived that' – is we tell ourselves that what we went through wasn't bad," Dern told Rolling Stone. The actress is a vocal part of the Time's Up movement and experienced a jarring revelation much like Fox's when she realized she was abused as a teen.

The Tale is going to be part of many conversations going forward, whether that's with regard to the film itself or to the real-world, #MeToo implications.

It can and should reframe how people examine society's approach to consent and to sexual power dynamics. We've made immense strides since the '70s – since even several months ago, Dern points out. But we have a long way to go, and The Tale takes us that much further.

Mashable
is a global, multi-platform media and entertainment company. Powered by its own proprietary technology, Mashable is the go-to source for tech, digital culture and entertainment content for its dedicated and influential audience around the globe.